


If Your Hands Are Cold, and the Fiddle Is Old

by russian_blue



Category: Devil Went Down to Georgia (Song)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 14:45:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/russian_blue/pseuds/russian_blue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The calluses have faded from your fingertips, leaving them tender and soft.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Your Hands Are Cold, and the Fiddle Is Old

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vtn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/gifts).



The calluses have faded from your fingertips, leaving them tender and soft. You have calluses on your palms instead, from holding the axe and the hoe, from carving the headboard for the baby’s cradle. It’s harder to curve your hand around the neck of the fiddle, harder to bend your fingers at angles that used to be as natural as breathing.

But that baby needs a father, and you’ll be damned -- in both senses of the word -- if you let the Devil win.

It’s cold in the woodshed, a hard January cold, with the warmth and light of Christmas long gone and spring nowhere in sight. The chill means you don’t feel it when your fingertips get rubbed raw, and that’s a blessing; but it also means you can’t feel the strings beneath them. You have to act from memory alone, and stuff your hands into your armpits every other minute so they’ll be warm enough to move.

But that baby needs a father, and you’ll be damned if you let the Devil win.

The fiddle is an old one, inherited from your father and his father before him. You haven’t touched it in ten years. Nobody wanted to hear you play it; they only wanted the golden fiddle, and the story of how you beat the Devil. Now the golden fiddle is gone, and that past victory won’t matter a lick if you can’t beat him again. Still, this one is the fiddle that did the beating in the first place, and when you lift it from its case you find it feels right in a way that shiny bauble never did.

Besides, that baby needs a father, and you’ll be damned if you let the Devil win.

So you practice. And if your hands are cold, and the fiddle is old, you still have what counts, the thing the Devil will never understand. You have your heart. A heart that has only grown stronger these ten years past, with a wife to love, and a child to raise, and a damn sight more than just pride to fight for.

That baby needs a father, and no way in hell or out of it is the Devil going to win.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I never knew “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” had a [sequel](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwEqEBimjy8) until I read your prompt. Thank you for putting it on my radar!


End file.
